Quick Note

Just a quick note of thanks to my Boss, who did me a big favor at the last minute. Thanks, Boss!

Now I just need to pack up a few last things and I'll be leaving tonight!

Laptop Woes & Last Post Before E3

I was "incommunicado" because I was hoping a friend of mine could fix my laptop for me. That isn't happening. So I need to send it off to be repaired or get a new one. Both of which are going to be difficult and neither are getting done before E3. This is quite vexing as I don't really have any spare computers to work on right now (even my brother's computer is too unreliable even if he did let me use it).

Fortunately, I have nothing but E3 to think about for the next week or so. I just need to finish packing and pick up my business cards from Staples. Then, so early on Monday it's sort-of Sunday night, I leave for the airport and I'm off to the best vacation ever.

Anyway, I'll have plenty to write about when I come back.

Alas, Poor Silas

Okay, one last long post before I go, since I have a little time online.

Silas Merlot is one of my favorite characters in the Girl Genius universe.

We first met Dr. Merlot waaaaay back in the first few pages of Volume 1. He's a cranky, pushy, slightly cowardly, know-it-all who is desperate who hold onto any scrap of status that he can in a society run by mad scientists. The so-called "Sparks" are people who are able to make mad science work. Give a Spark the parts for a clock and he'll make an automated washing machine, machinegun turret, or flying mechanical bird depending on his personality and mood (he probably won't make a clock, but if he does it will be a very unusual clock). Silas Merlot is not a Spark.

Well he wasn't a Spark. He was a very, very intelligent guy who is stuck in a world where he might be the smartest person in the room, but he's still overshadowed by the magic brain people. For that reason, despite his personality flaws, I really felt for him and made him my avatar for most of my online forum accounts.

But he did exhibit some very Spark-like behavior. Or maybe he was just cranky. Or someone who isn't a Spark but has natural Spark-like tendencies and "gets caught up in the enthusiasm". Oh wait... maybe he's a Spark after all? Yes (that style of speech bubble is reserved for Sparks)!?!

Silas breifly showed up before, somewhere in the archives that I'll edit in later, but it was a brief cameo and there was no indication that he had become a Spark. But now...

Silas' trouble is that he harbors a grudge against Agatha. This grudge is at least partly motivated by the fact that he wasn't a Spark. But now he is. So if he thought about it rationally for a second, he'd realize there's really no reason to attack Agatha. Unfortunately, even good Sparks are quite unhinged and have trouble focusing on reality. So now that Silas is a Spark, it's impossible for him to give up his obsession on his own.

I was hoping that maybe Silas would survive his denouement and become an ally of Agatha. After all, Baron Wolfenbach keeps DuPree around and she's done much, much worse. Silas's clank may be his Breakthough device, and that means he has just started to show off his potential. But unfortunately The Castle takes matters into it's own... masonry.

Poor Silas. There's still a chance that he'll be revived, but it looks like he's done for. On the upside, there's plenty of nice new art of Silas to photoshop into avatars. On the downside, it looks like there won't be any more ever again. So tragic...

You Can Fail 100 Times As Long As You Succeed Once

One last fascinating video I ran across before I go:




EDIT: Eh, I've edited and re-edited and there's no way to say what I originally wanted to say without it sounding like sour grapes. So I'll just let the video speak for itself.

(Comments for this post are disabled for now due to me being incommunicado for a while.)

Incommunicado

I'll be stuck without any predictable Internet access until about June 6 starting tomorrow afternoon. Basically, I probably won't be able to check my emails, PMs, et cetera, more than a couple times until I'm back from E3.

The biggest thing this affects is showing off @venture's current stages. I definitely won't have time to post any screenshots before Internet access is cut off (the computer I'm developing it on doesn't have a working Internet connection right now). On the bright side, the various disparate prototypes are starting to coalesce into a coherent whole.

I'll have plenty to write about when I get back from E3, so look out for that starting on June 8th.

Leaving for E3 in 160 Hours

I can hardly believe it, but this time next week I'll be in the air on my way to Los Angeles and the Electronic Entertainment Expo. The only way I could be more excited is if I was going to the IGF, but maybe I'll get to do both next year...

This year is the first year that E3 is going back to being a "huge" show where the biggest and best annoucements are revealed. I'm particularly looking forward to what Valve have to say, as well as the rest of the show in general. (Maybe I'll get to play Portal 2 or Ep 3? Here's hoping!)

Square are also going to reveal their "mystery game" there. I hope it's another PC game, considering I had to wait almost a decade bewtween the release of Final Fantasy VIII PC and The Last Remnant on PC.

@venture: Retro Procedural FPS

It is time to write a bit about my Secret Project I've been hinting at elsewhere. I am working on a retro-style procedurally generated first-person shooter. It's being created in Game Maker, since that's what I've been using all semester and I'm pretty comfortable with it.

Retro Style: I grew up in a time when TRON's visuals were considered ridiculously awesome and every kid I knew dreamed of the day when we might play games that looked like that on our PCs. Audio tape storage and other really retro technology was already obsolete by the time I got my first computers, but editing batch files and making DOS Boot Disks was a way of life for the PC gamer of the time. I had to work for my games, and those games had graphics that were designed for, and required you to make use of, your imagination. So graphically @venture is going to be a tribute to the games of that era.

Plus, retro-style means I can spend more time on the programming side instead of worrying about making things look pretty.

Procedurally Generated: I've wanted to create a roguelike of my own ever since I started playing the DOS version of Rogue and various variants in the mid-90s. At the time I was also into a game called Warhammer Quest, which is like a multiplayer boardgame roguelike. Until recently, I hadn't considered Game Maker as a possibility for such a project. Working on Steam City Chronicles changed my mind.

Although there haven't been a whole lot of Game Maker roguelikes, there are a few out there already. But there's never been a procedural FPS made in GM before as far as I know.

First Person Shooter: (For those who don't know what a first-person shooter is, it's a game shown from the point of view of the protagonist, where most of the gameplay involves shooting things.)

It was the Yoyo Games First-Person Shooter tutorial that gave me the idea for a procedural FPS. The way the walls are laid out in the 2D view reminded me of the "overhead" standard roguelike perspective (as well as the fact that in GM, "3D" is still generated from a completely 2D room). It occured to me that instead of laying out the rooms manually I could figure out / borrow some algorithms and get GM to lay out the rooms for me. It'll obviously take a bit of work to make it function, but so far it seems feasable.

The whole thing is going to be highly experimental. I don't know exactly how much like a roguelike, how much like a FPS, how much like a traditional RPG, or how much like a traditional adventure game it's going to be yet. I don't know whether I'm going to stick to a vaguely D&Dish / Tolkienish theme like so many roguelikes, or go for some kind of steampunky-fantasy theme, or go for a more "self aware retro" feel where the character knows he's in a computer, or go all out sci fi and set it in a giant spacecraft, abandoned space colony, or post-apocalyptic London.

I'm definitely aiming to have:

• full features of original Rogue environments: algorithmically created walls, rooms, passageways, and doors


• Mouselook + WASD shooter controls


• a HUD stolen- er, inspired by the Ultima Underworld series


• pixillated goblins with serviceable AI


• a proper inventory


• actual Data Structures to handle the behind-the-scenes stuff.


• procedural environment features (simple trees / mushrooms generated from algorithms, for example)


• switching from 3D to 2D and back again for a "magic map" (the documentation has a warning that this doesn't work, but we'll see)


• proper menus and everything


• light and fog effects, since GM has options for that

I may also have, depending on time and what seems to be working:

• more early 90s-looking than early 80s-looking graphics


• prefabricated rooms loaded from text files (that's Vaults in Angband jargon, but I got the idea from WQ originally)


• a "card dealing" mechanic to deal out the vaults like cards just like in WQ, but mixing in algorithmically created rooms as well.


• procedural puzzles (but it's doubtful unless I get the vault dealer to work)


• shops and/or workshops (if I go for the Steampunk-Fantasy theme)


• water terrain (like the Underworld games)


• sloping floors and walls


• tunneling through earth and destructible walls as a major gameplay feature (like Dungeon Keeper & Dwarf Fortress)


• submitted the "final" prototype at the end of summer to Yoyo Games website as a "work in progress"

What I have working right now definitely isn't worth putting screenshots up yet, but hopefully as soon as next week I'll start posting them.

The New Star Trek Is Perfect Because Of The Villain

There will be some minor spoilers concerning the origin of the villain in the new movie. They're not big twists or anything, but if you're really worried about it, go see the movie first.

First of all, The Onion is right:


Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As 'Fun, Watchable'

Now, I wouldn't consider myself a Trekkie. I've never been to a Trek convention, for example. I had absolutely no complaints about the new movie, so i'm definitely not a Trekkie. As someone who was a big fan of the original series when it was rerun shortly before The Next Generation started (I was excited to find out Reading Rainbow host LeVar Burton was going to be in TNG), and more or less kept up with the various series over the years, I think the movie is absolutely perfect.

Think about it: The best Star Trek movies are the best because they leverage the classic villains really well. Kahn in 2, the Klingons in 6, the Borg in 8. If not the villains, then they leverage a good time travel story line in 4 and (again) 8. The biggest problem with Nemesis(10)? The Romulans didn't get a chance to be the Big Bad, and they should have been instead of some dumb clone. The clone dude, who is so forgettable I don't even remember his name, isn't the worst Star Trek villain, but he definitely wasn't good enough to upstage the Romulans.

The new film not only does absolutely everything right, it actually corrects what was wrong in past movies. Nero is not only a Romulan, and an awesome villain, he's quite possibly the most memorable villain ever.

Now let's think about this for a minute: Nero is basically an ordinary guy. He's not royalty, doesn't have funky alien powers, isn't genetically enhanced, or even have much advanced technology compared to everyone else in his time. He doesn't have any grand plans for domination. He's just the captain of a mining vessel, the frickin Red Dwarf of the Star Trek universe. He even speaks like a regular guy. He's a cockney accent short of being David Lister.

His villainous motivation? Greif. His planet gets destroyed but before he can work through all the stages of grief he's dumped a century and a half in the past. He gets twenty-five years to work through Shock & Denial and Pain & Guilt but before he can work through Anger (bear in mind he's a Romulan and they don't deal with anger very well to begin with) he's given a planet-destroying device. So he starts out as Lister but ends up somewhere between Stanley H Tweedle and Darth Vader. A bit of Captain Ahab too, but considering how loyal his crew seem to be, more like (and this is probably deliberate) Captain Kirk from the original series.

Kirk starts off as the underdog, because this is the origin movie, but in many ways Nero is even more of an underdog who just happens to have a giant mining ship and planet-destroying-device from the future. Everything else in the movie is basically well-portrayed stuff we already knew about, but Nero is the perfect villain, and that makes this the perfect Star Trek movie.

SSTF2

I have a bunch of things lined up for this weblog, but for now here's a video. It's a little late to post it here, as it's been all around, including even the TF2 weblog, but here's Super Smash... Team Fortress 2:

Watch more videos of TF2

Game Presentation Reminder

I'll be leaving this post as the top post for a while, and then it's going to be a lot of posts on various subjects. Anyway:

This is a reminder that the Game 2 & 3 students at Camden County College are presenting their games on the Blackwood campus in the CIM building auditorium at 7:00 PM next tuesday evening (12th of May). If you can get to the Blackwood campus, ask where the CIM building is and go in; there will be signs to the auditorium when you go in.

All are welcome except Gordon Babcock, of course.